Hi

I am in the process of deciding a first build for unraid. I thought I had narrowed down to the antec 902 or lian li pc-p50, before I realised that the lian li was not USB 3. I couldn't actually find any 9 bay lian li's at all. Am I missing something? (think I'll stick with a smaller 9 bay rather than 12, by the way)

Cheers

Ben

As far as I can see, neither of those cases has USB3 ports on the front/top panel.  However, I do wonder why this is of concern to you - what do you plan to use the front USB ports for?

 

If it's for ad-hoc connection of external drives, consider using eSATA, which the Antec 902 is equipped with.  I've just purchased one of these.

Hi

Thanks, but the antec does come in a USB 3 version. To answer your question, I guess I figured I'd use the front USB 3 port for connecting a USB 3 device from time to time!

 

Your docking station does look useful but doesn't allow for a USB 3 device to be plugged in to an esata port, from what I can see, so is not a replacement for a USB 3 port (it looks like it plugs internal drives into USB or esata). However correct me if I am wrong. If it does usb 3 devices into esata too it really does look like a useful all in one, and I may get one at some point.

Having never thought about it before, i would simplistically assume that it is not trivial to plug a USB 3 device into an esata port as USB has power but esata doesn't (at least I think...)

 

Otherwise, all else being equal, why wouldn't I prefer a case with a front USB 3 port? I find that part of your reply a bit odd. I agree it's not essential, but that's not the point, surely. I like the look of the p50 and probably would have already decided on it if it did have USB 3. That's why I asked if anyone knows of a Lian Li with 9 bays and USB 3, rather than if anyone knows whether I should care if my case has USB 3  .

Ben

You're correct - it is purely a SATA drive docking station which can be connected to the host either via eSATA or USB3.

 

Of course you are perfectly entitled to look for a USB3 port on the front of your machine.  My thinking is that there would still be USB3 on the back and unRAID doesn't really benefit a great deal from USB3.  The main use would be if you intend to move significant quantities of data from external drives on a regular basis.  But even then, USB2 could, theoretically, transfer data faster than unRAID can write it to a parity-protected array, so USB3 will only show a significant gain when reading, or writing to a fast cache drive.

Fair point on write speed.

It was also partly to do with future proofing the case for a while. If I end up needing a bigger case for any reason then I'd probably want to re-use that case in a non-unRaid box. Annoyingly, the full tower pc-p80 seems to have a compatible replacement front panel but not the p50. I'll bear it all in mind and thanks for the comments.